What I’m saying above is that the real issue with streaming isn’t that artists don’t get paid (spoiler: they do) but that the incentives for click bait populism risk screwing with how content is put together.

Luckily it’s never been so easy to get your art out to your audience (free) without gatekeepers that there is a balancing force enabling more uncommercial art than ever before – just don’t complain if the audience doesn’t listen.

i do a bit of both

i buy on bandcamp for me for anyone small.

the big artists i figure are probably ok for streaming.

I dont get to as many gigs as i`d like to which limits buying merch etc. i like the bandcamp platform as it means i can do my (very little) bit

I just repel against the enforced subscription model across as many aspects of my consumption as I can.

It’s not enforced in most cases though. Nearly every music and movie streaming service can be picked up and dropped whenever you please.

I make a living selling physical media across CD, DVD, Blu-ray, Books and Video Games. Can’t recall the last time I purchased a physical product outside of Switch games. Times are changing, you either change with them or get left behind. I do think there will always be a market for physical media though. Some folk just like to own something tangible.

Why feel guilt though? Do you feel the same when watching Netflix or downloading a game over Steam? What singles out musicians and not game developers, actors etc?

No one seems to be concerned that ITV aren’t paying Bruce Willis enough for millions of people watching Die had this Christmas

No, because Hollywood actors get paid very well upfront – and those with the clout to secure TV residuals also get a nice additional revenue stream as a little bonus.

Musicians work on a revenue-share model instead, based on sales and streaming. As mentioned repeatedly, live work and T-shirts are their additional revenue streams.

**** that: I’m meant to feel sorry for people that can’t set up a Shopify store and sell dropshipped:

TShirts
Hoodies
Beanies
Any other merch at massive markup

So many bands I follow have no direct fan contact, merch store, don’t manage their own social media, no making of videos or background into albums outside Genius.

They cry about Spotify – I wouldn’t even know half of them if it wasn’t for Spotify and certainly wouldn’t have known or taken a risk on their CD prior, nor would they have got mainstream airplay on radio.

I am into hi-end hifi and would pay a premium for well mastered 24 bit audio. Industry happy to sell £££ speakers and DACs but not put out proper audio. Tidal are adding proprietary MQA which will only make things worse, what’s worse is is only a tiny proportion of their recordings are mastered this way. It’s like a beta but they are charging full price.

So many opportunities to make money / engage and own fan their fan base outside of Spotify. Many that 16yr old kids are doing as side hustle on their weekend yet a whole industry somehow can’t solve.

Think about it for a second. Rat boy and 50/01 are doing a better job and probably making more money than most indie bands using the same tools they should be using…

Fascinating, speccyguy. I do wonder though about music fans – I mean some people have probably been listening to the same Pink Floyd vinyl for decades and not handing over a penny.

I thought either Spotify or Apple Music would have them so I wouldn’t have to repurchase a lot of them. Utterly useless, IIRC 75% of what I looked for wasn’t there.

I’ve got an Amazon Music unlimited sub, so give me a few titles and I’ll have a look. I’m genuinely interested.

The attitude of a few people on here is little more than condoning legal music piracy.
Basically you’re saying that someone who commits days, hours, months to produce a work for you to enjoy shouldn’t expect to be paid for that work just so that you can indulge yourself and get it effectively for free! What a bunch of miserable freeloaders.
Would you accept being paid a few pence per hour, and be told by the company that if you want more money, you have to work more hours? That’s almost exactly what the boss of Spotify has told artists.
I refuse, on principle, to support or use any streaming service except radio, which still pays artists a decent royalty rate, I buy CD’s from shops, at gigs, or direct from artists, and, when I can, gig tickets, because music is hugely important to me, and has been for almost literally my entire life – my very earliest memory is a song on the radio, which was released three years after my birth. ‘Freight Train’, by Nancy Whisky, in fact, and I see the treatment of artists by the likes of the smug piece of shit who runs Spotify as utterly abhorrent.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dzje3/daniel-ek-spotify-artists-pay-interview

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/music-streaming-ucps-spotify

I have streamed music lately from YouTube often from the artist’s page. Does this mean they agree with it? I just like watching the video’s. Sometimes I own the music or it,s old and rare.

The attitude of a few people on here is little more than condoning legal music piracy.
Basically you’re saying that someone who commits days, hours, months to produce a work for you to enjoy shouldn’t expect to be paid for that work just so that you can indulge yourself and get it effectively for free! What a bunch of miserable freeloaders.

Nobody is forcing musicians to use Spotify or use any other streaming platform. I don’t get your argument at all. Let’s take the violinist mentioned earlier. If she had released a CD what percentage of the sales would she have received and how would this one off payment compare to pays per stream? How many platforms is she streaming on? What’s she doing to promote herself etc?

There are a lot of musicians out there which means there’s a lot of competition for the listeners ear. Sounds harsh, but just like every other industry, it means not everyone is going to make a great living.

“Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape,” Ek prophesied. “You can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough. The artists today that are making it realise that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans. It is about putting the work in, about the storytelling around the album, and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans.”

Should we not expect creatives to earn a decent living by putting the hours in?
It appears to work in other business sectors. Some definitely need to be a bit more T shaped.

Is it not just a case of the money is spread out over more artists now? Instead of a few making loads of money, we have loads of artists making a little?

I buy CD, vinyl and stream. I don’t feel its upto me to decide how an artist chooses to sell their work.

There are artists who don’t allow there music to be streamed on Spotify etc (KLF for instance) So they do have a choice.

There are a lot of smaller artists who would NEVER have been able to get their work out there in the past, with the traditional music release process. Now anyone can, you can literally record, mix and master in your bedroom and have it on Spotify.

Its not all bad.

No one is forced in the literal sense to put their music on Spotify but with the vast majority of music content revenue coming through streaming it would be a brave decision to turn away from it and put an alternative marketing strategy in place.

For those that do have streaming services, take a moment to look at your listening history. The artists you actually listen to (or the rights holders if different – an entirely separate discussion!) are the ones who are getting paid.

Strip out your guilty pleasures, as no-one will begrudge you them, and then decide if you’re happy with where your money goes. Because it doesn’t go to who you follow, or who you put in your playlists, or who you tell people you listen to. It goes to who you listen to.

There is more money flowing to artists than ever before – that it is not going to artists you like seems to be the biggest argument that is being made.

If you subscribe for £10 per month and then listen to your favourite artist for 8 hours per day every day then they will get around $30 per month from your listening activity*.

*a premium subscriber listening to an average 3 minute song in the UK market for this calc. Needless to say, in a discussion about musicians getting paid, that you should be listening to the music and not just leaving it running 24:7 just to put activity on an artist. Don’t do that as it is cheating musicians that do get listened to.

Go to a gig, buy some merch.

Oh, hang on. No gigs at present 🙁

No one is forced in the literal sense to put their music on Spotify but with the vast majority of music content revenue coming through streaming it would be a brave decision to turn away from it and put an alternative marketing strategy in place.

Quite a few big names did hold out for years, eg Peter Gabriel, but pretty much all caved eventually. The march of progress waits for no man.

The arts have always been underfunded.

The music business is a dinosaur.

People don’t value music because its so easy to get hold of for free.

I don’t think I get paid enough in my job but that’s what the market values me at.

I think the answer is to go to gigs of all the artists Spotify helps you find. However I got thinking about the stream payout and thought I’d do some maths. I’m interested to update for this year but last year my Spotify wrapped had me at something stupid like 30 days of playtime since I listen to music most of the time at work.

So 30 days X 24 hours X 60 minutes is 43200 minutes of playtime. Assume an average song is 5 minutes so that’s 8640 streams at $0.0032 equals £20.70 payout for my year of streaming… Which isn’t great… (I’m on duo so £78 a year)

But I’d echo sentiments that streaming has opened up whole genres of music that I would never have discovered without so I suspect its value is somewhat higher than the number above given the amount of gigs I go to in normal times.

Edit: got the $0.0032 from a sound chart blog but lost the link

Would you accept being paid a few pence per hour

But that’s not how musicians are paid for producing records. I wouldn’t accept that, because I have chosen a work format that doesn’t work that way. However, if I were say, an author, I could put years into a book, self publish it, and if no-one buys it then it’s because it wasn’t very good and I’d have to accept that. I’m not saying that musicians have to put up with nothing – especially because people ARE listening to them – but it is definitely the case that people can put lots of work into something and get not much out. One of my wife’s favourite authors (Tad Williams, pretty well known in his genre) has a YouTube channel on which he admitted he makes minimum wage from his writing.

Clearly the situation is difficult here, I’m not saying that musicians should just put up with it – but what’s the alternative? A streaming service is giving musicians a cut of what they themselves make. You can’t really agree to a fixed price for each song play when the streaming company’s income isn’t based on plays, because the risk of having to pay out more money than you make are too high.

I was thinking about the violinist mentioned earlier who got 700k streams and made £12 or something. The big question here is, if she was only distributed on CD would she have sold 700k CDs? Would she have sold any? Kids streaming endless pop songs 18 hours a day will be driving her revenue down, because those artists will take a higher percentage of the pot. But on the other hand, if they pay for the service *because* of the pop songs and she ends up getting listened to because she’s on the same service, that means she’s getting more listens than she otherwise would.

Maybe Spotify could pay her a flat fee per song that she submits? This is basically how Netflix works, at least for its own content – they pay for the cost of producing the show in the hope that the addition to its library will attract viewers in the future.

I’m trying to find numbers for the total number of streams, but struggling. Apparently in the US alone in 2019 there were over 1.1 trillion streams with approximately 70 million subscribers. But there are about 400m subscribers worldwide, which would put the number in the region of 5tn streams per year. Even at 1c per stream, that would make $50bn per year paid out to musicians, and the violinist would make $7k. Spotify’s turnover last year was $7bn and it seems that they only made a profit the last three years which suggests their operating costs are quite high. Spotify accounts for about a third of subs, so call it 1.7tn streams. They are making about 0.4c per stream based on that, which would put the violinist’s share of that income at $3k.

I’ve found an article that says that their “‘Cost Of Revenue’ (COR), which ‘consists predominantly of royalty and distribution costs… which we pay to certain record labels, music publishers, and other rights holders’” is about 75% ish of their total revenue. So from that, the source material is costing them 0.3c per stream on average. Which, if distributed equally, would suggest that the violinist would be entitled to about $2.25k

So she appears to be getting screwed, on that basis. But by whom? The record labels of other more famous artists, perhaps? They are clearly getting more than 0.3c per share if she’s getting less. After all, the big labels hold all the cards – or they did, when streaming was trying to get off the ground, because streaming was trying to displace the existing means of music consumption that people were already using, and people would not sign up to those services if the content wasn’t there. So they needed the big names.

And this is the other issue – how many people signed up to spotify to listen to classical violin music, compared to how many people signed up to listen to Ed Sheeran all day? Should the payout from streaming be weighted by how much influence the artist has on the subscribers decision to pony up?

buy a raspberry pi, set it up using your computer, then leave it running as a headless machine sat on your desk, running your favorite artists album on a loop (with no speakers attached) for weeks on end? when you want to listen to it, you could even turn some speakers on and drop in to the album where its gotten to, and then turn the speakers off again when you go out.

It’s always a tricky one. This is by no means a solution to the streaming issue, but my method. I use Spotify for everything digital, mostly in the car it must be said, but I use it for checking out new bands and new releases. If I like it, then I tend to buy the vinyl and listen to that when at home. When I’m out/driving, I listen to it via Spotify so I often end up streaming music I’ve already bought so I feel like they’re being rewarded, rather than me buying it once and then listening to that copy repeatedly (I’ve never bothered with the download code that comes with LP’s). I also (pre-covid) used to try and get to live shows as much as possible since bands make much of their revenue from touring as opposed to album sales.

Also, I point blank refuse to buy vinyl from anyone other than independent stores or the band’s webstores direct, so no music from Amazon etc.

In essence, I use Spotify to find/try new music, in the way that the niche radio shows and indie-record stores used to provide but now are sadly few and far between.

apologies, havent read the whole thread, and i dont use bandcamp so dont know if this is what already happens on there, but why can the following not exist?

an app format much like spotify/deezer etc for ease of browsing/discovering music.
first play of any song is free (to see if you like it and want to hear it again).
from then on you pay for your listening, at a price set by the artist (or label for those artists not around anymore)
so a lower cost for each song or each whole album each time you play it. or….a higher cost for downloading to listen to as many times as you want (so the same as buying their cd). again, all prices to be different depending on what the artist wants to sell it at.
all at as good a quality stream as you wish. crap internet connection? low bandwidth. decent home internet? go high quality.

does this setup exist anywhere? and if not why not? mebbes im missing something obvious.

@rsl1 If your activity paid out only £40 (premium UK stream rate is approx double what you used) then you listen only 1/2 as much as an average listener each month.

Stream rate = All the revenue from the subs type in that market / All the streams from those users

@olly someone had to go there but please don’t do this. Inflating activity takes money from genuine artists. (and it screws up which playlists the music you fake-stream gets added to which then misses the chance of putting it in front of people who might like it and play it for real)

The model is “a share of the revenue based on how much your work is listened to” – no one gets a free pass now by selling a critically acclaimed trendy work that no-one listens to. The money goes to artists who listeners listen to. Is that not a fair way to distribute the revenue?

The money goes to artists who listeners listen to. Is that not a fair way to distribute the revenue?

No, because popularity isn’t a measure of quality nor is it a measure of skill.

@thepodge Then give us a better solution.

The audience are the strongest arbiters of success that there has ever been. Playlist curation follows what listeners are finding and listening to. The gatekeepers’ power is diminishing.

Are you sure you want to make an argument in favour of a small number of industry insiders deciding who gets the spoils?

If you’re that bothered why not just send musicians you think deserve it money direct, could be via patreon or something.

No, because popularity isn’t a measure of quality nor is it a measure of skill.

WTF?

Doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

You don’t have an inherent right to a wage as a muscian, you get paid when people buy / stream / see live your work. If you’re not very popular, you don’t get paid very much. Skill doesn’t come into it.

No different to any other profession…

does this setup exist anywhere?

If you buy physical CDs on Amazon, an MP3 version gets added to ‘your music’ which you can then listen to as much as you want via the app.

If you’re that bothered why not just send musicians you think deserve it money direct, could be via patreon or something.

This is a very good point. You can send them your £6.99 or whatever and they’d get the whole amount, not just the share that the label gives them. And you’d avoid the printing and shipping of a phsyical CD that you don’t need.

buy a raspberry pi, set it up using your computer, then leave it running as a headless machine sat on your desk, running your favorite artists album on a loop (with no speakers attached) for weeks on end? when you want to listen to it, you could even turn some speakers on and drop in to the album where its gotten to, and then turn the speakers off again when you go out.

Could you not do that upload some songs just make yourself money?

Would the youtube model be the way forward for artists? There are quite a few vloggers making decent amounts of money? Surely artists would make more money from a super open platform like youtube, where you can upload anything you want directly to it’s servers with artists paid through view based advertising revenues,

@speccyguy & @footflaps

I don’t have a better solution but I never said I did.

Without a doubt the violinist is far more skilled than anyone in the top 10 but isn’t as popular.

RHCP V’s All Saints… who’s version of under the bridge was most popular? Who put in the most effort? Who made the most money?

Don’t get me wrong there are a lot of crap bands out there, I’ve been in a good few of them but saying a band is better because they are popular is just wrong.

Without a doubt the violinist is far more skilled than anyone in the top 10 but isn’t as popular.

Skilled at what? Widdling away on a musical instrument or creating music that people actually want to listen to?

Don’t get me wrong, I am sure said violinist is a great musician and technically very proficient. But that’s for nought if she’s not good at creating. Even if she is an accomplished composer, unless it’s the type of music that a large number of people want to listen to, it’s no surprise she’s earning less than the music megastars.

To succeed in the music business, you have to be good at selling your music / brand / image to people. Using those metrics, she’s not as good as <racks brain for an appropriate pop reference> the Spice Girls.

To succeed in the music business, you have to be good at selling your music / brand / image to people. Using those metrics, she’s not as good as <racks brain for an appropriate pop reference> the Spice Girls.

Or Little Mix who are now apparently the most successful act in UK chart history.

Were the Spice girls good at that or was Cowell’s team good at that?

I don’t know the violinist but I suspect her listeners are of a generation not accurately represented by Spotify.

Should the Spice girls be paid more for singing & dancing along to something someone else has written than a violinist who (perhaps) writes her own stuff or at least can read and perform music that is far more complex than standard pop?

And yes its no surprise she’s earning less, but again, popularity is not a metric of quality.

You’re getting so confused between acclaim and payment. I haven’t looked into the violinist story but her share is probably a fraction of what was paid out on that song.

Which I don’t blame you for given the alternative fact above about Little Mix. Who uncritically publishes ‘news’ like that?

Skilled at what? Widdling away on a musical instrument or creating music that people actually want to listen to?

+1

What is the purpose of a highly skilled muscian no one wants to listen to? They can just do it as a hobby. They don’t have an inherent right to millions in royalties from records they haven’t sold just because it’s skilled!

That’s how the USSR fell apart, they centrally decided all the priorities and ignored supply and demand.

What is the purpose of a highly skilled muscian no one wants to listen to?

I’m sure there are plenty that would sound great on vinyl through a Naim system.

I prefer to think of them as **** (insert instrument of choice) bollocks. See Steve Vai et al. Technically brilliant but limited appeal.

Vanessa Mae never made her name by doing the same old, you would think a fellow violinist would have twigged on to that. In the end it’s just laziness, if you engage with your fans (ie. tour, live stream etc.) you will reap the rewards, if you just sit back and expect to get paid for it don’t be surprised when you get naff all. Story of music since time immemorial.

What is the purpose of a highly skilled muscian no one wants to listen to?

To be a session musician for people that can write a good tune

People who weren’t top flight session musicians used to be able to be able to earn a passable wage when the music unions had more strength. What **** classical and jazz players were the loss of those and the introduction of shit amateurs into the live music scene – to both the detriment of the audience and the players.

However I guess these days, most people are uncivilised cretins so they wouldn’t notice, why pay for a musician who got through music college when you can let Tim nice but dim who barely passed grade 6 play for free and still attract the same idiots.

To be a session musician for people that can write a good tune

Then they work as a session muscian and get paid accordingly ie not much as most of the royalties go to the author rather then the performer.

Then they work as a session muscian and get paid accordingly ie not much as most of the royalties go to the author rather then the performer.

It’s that or 12p a quarter or whatever for nobody listening to your music on Spotify. Doesn’t matter how great you are if nobody likes what you produce. Lend your talent to somebody else, get a different job or gain exposure like violin lady by moaning about it and secretly hoping more people listen to you due to the exposure this brings 😉

Actually, good session players earn decent money.

I should know, I’m the odd one out but the rest of my family are all musicians stretching back generations.

People like Wayne Bergeron aren’t exactly poor, it’s just these days you either earn great money or **** all – there’s not much in between.

This is what paying half decent money gets you….

and

One day, when everything gets automated and pop music production is done skynet – humans will regret losing the ability to come together like that and produce art that is such a human endeavour and a shared and collective effort.